November 30, 2025
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Cyber Intelligence > cyber espionage
Editorial Team
Cyber Espionage Hacktivism News
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Iran targets Western journalists

Hackers with close ties to the intelligence arm of Iran’s military, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, are now personally targeting journalists, professors, and researchers. According to Microsoft, which detected the new activity, Iran is anxious to gather information on the entire range of Western views regarding the ongoing conflict in the Middle East.

“Based on the identities of the targets observed in this campaign and the use of lures related to the Israel-Hamas war, this campaign may be an attempt to gather perspectives on events related to the war from individuals across the ideological spectrum,” says Microsoft.

The Iran-backed hackers, known as Mint Sandstorm, a composite name used to describe several subgroups of activity with ties to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard, use a range of new techniques. For example, the hackers use legitimate but compromised email accounts to conduct highly planned phishing attacks against key journalists.

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admin
News One Minute Roundup
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Russia-Backed Hackers Infiltrate Microsoft’s Corporate Email System – January 22nd

Microsoft announced on a blog post that the email intrusion attack began in November 2023 and was discovered on January 12th, 2024. Microsoft deduced that the attack originated from a Russian nation-state hacking group.

The Microsoft blog post stated the attack gained access to a small percentage of Microsoft corporate email accounts, consisting of Microsoft leadership, security, and IT team members. The incident is still under investigation and reported to the SEC, Microsoft vowed to take any further necessary action while being as transparent as possible.

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admin
News One Minute Roundup
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JP Morgan Chase Combats 45 Billion Cyber Attacks Daily – January 18th

On Wednesday, January 17th, JPMorgan Chase’s asset and wealth management division head, Mary Callahan Erdoes, said during the World Economic Forum in Davos that the firm faces a staggering 45 billion breach attempts daily.

Mary explained on a panel session that they have more security engineers than Google and Amazon, out of necessity, as threat actors increasingly get “smarter, savvier, quicker, more devious and mischievous.”

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Tony Glover
Geopolitics Malicious Bots News
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Geopolitical tensions fuel botnet boom

Recent weeks have seen an exponential rise in malicious botnets performing reconnaissance scanning to scout out victims. According to researchers at cybersecurity firm Netscout, the number of potentially compromised devices rose from around 10,000 to roughly 144,000 over December, with no sign of the trend letting up.

“The trend continued into the new year, with the largest spikes occurring on January 5 and 6, eclipsing one million distinct devices. The levels reached an unprecedented 1,294,416 on the 5th,” reports Netscout.

The Netscout researchers say that this increased malicious scanning has been isolated to five key countries: The United States, China, Vietnam, Taiwan, and Russia. All have seen a rise in attackers using cheap or free cloud and hosting servers to create botnet launch pads.

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Editorial Team
Aerospace News Phishing
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US aerospace company hit by cyber-attack

An unknown threat actor has breached an as-yet-unnamed US aerospace company. According to BlackBerry, who first highlighted the attack, the threat actor’s weaponization of a phishing attack became operational around September 2022, with the offensive phase of the attack occurring almost a year later in July of this year.

The cybercriminals responsible, whom BlackBerry has christened “AeroBlade,” are believed to have used the intervening nine months to develop the additional resources necessary to ensure access to the aerospace company’s systems to exfiltrate potentially highly valuable information – pointing to a high degree of professionalism and persistence on the part of the attacker.

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Tony Glover
China Energy Sector News Russia
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Nuclear facility reportedly hacked by Russia and China

In what is an urgent and stark warning to nuclear facilities around the world, UK nuclear facility Sellafield, formerly called Windscale, is reported to have been hacked by groups linked to China and Russia. The 70-year-old sprawling six-square-kilometre facility, located on the North-West coast of England, holds the planet’s largest store of plutonium as a result of processing nuclear waste from decades of atomic power generation and weapons programs.

The UK authorities do not know exactly when the hack originally occurred, according to The Guardian newspaper, although breaches are said to have been detected as long ago as 2015, when sleeper malware, used to attack systems remotely and at will over a long period, was found to have been embedded. In what amounts to a national scandal for the UK, it is still not yet known if the malware has actually been eradicated.

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Tony Glover
Analysis Cloud Security Cyber Espionage
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Storm gathers over the cloud

News of the mass exploitation of ownCloud customers as a result of a zero-day vulnerability follows revelations earlier this month of a critical security vulnerability in Microsoft’s Azure cloud platform.

Reports of gaping security flaws in cloud services come at a bad time for cloud service providers in general and Microsoft in particular. The Seattle-based computing giant is currently doing its utmost to persuade the US, UK, and Australian governments that its Azure Government Cloud is the best way for the AUKUS trio to securely update cross-border information and enhance mutual collaboration. This might prove problematic for Microsoft, whose Azure platform was recently proven to have a  critical vulnerability, and some of whose government clients suffered a series of serious breaches earlier this year.

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admin
News One Minute Roundup
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Pittsburgh-area Water Authority Hit by Cyber Attack – November 28th

The Municipal Water Authority of Aliquippa reported a cyberattack that shut down their water pressure technology, to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security this past weekend. 

According to the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, the unassuming cyberattack may come with serious international implications, with the attack suspected to come from an anti-Israeli Iranian threat actor group labeled as “Cyber Av3ngers”. This nation-state cyberattack is not the first to disrupt critical water infrastructure.

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Editorial Team
Chip Technology Cyber Espionage News
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Chip war with China heats up

As the Biden administration prepares to impose further limits on China’s access to leading-edge chip technology, news has broken over the weekend that Chinese hackers have been siphoning off some of Europe’s ground-breaking chip technology for years.

The infamous Chinese hacker group Chimera, had access to the network of Dutch semiconductor giant NXP, for over two years, from late 2017 to the beginning of 2020. The hackers, believed to be backed by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), are understood to have consistently stolen intellectual property, including, crucially, the company’s cutting-edge chip designs. According to sources close to the situation, the full extent of the threat has still to be disclosed.

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admin
News One Minute Roundup
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UK and US Develop Global AI Security Guidelines – November 27th

The UK’s National Cyber Security Center (NCSC), in partnership with the US’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) launched the ‘Guidelines for Secure AI System Development’.

The guidelines are set to secure AI system development, to help developers make informed cybersecurity decisions at every step of the AI development process. These AI guidelines were also co-signed in cooperation with 21 other international agencies and ministries from across the world. 

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admin
News One Minute Roundup
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EU Cybersecurity Drill Tests Readiness for 2024 Elections – November 22nd

In preparation for the 2024 elections, the European Parliament’s services, the European Commission, and the EU Agency for Cybersecurity conducted a cybersecurity exercise. The drill, held in the European Parliament, involved national and EU partners testing crisis plans and responses to potential cybersecurity incidents. Representatives from electoral and cybersecurity authorities participated, aiming to enhance their capacity to address cybersecurity issues and update protocols for securing election technology. 

The exercise addressed risks such as information manipulation and cyber-attacks, crucial for safeguarding the integrity of the upcoming European Parliament election scheduled for June 6-9, 2024.

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admin
News One Minute Roundup
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EU and Ukraine Partner to Boost Cybersecurity – November 14th

The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) signed a Working Agreement with Ukraine’s Administration of the State Service of Special Communications and Information Protection of Ukraine (SSSCIP) to boost cybersecurity efforts.

The Working Agreement signed by ENISA and SSSCIP will focus on the EU supporting Ukraine in its efforts to protect itself from geopolitically-fueled cyber attacks from Russian threat actors through improving critical infrastructure, cybersecurity skills, and capacity building.

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Editorial Team
AI Government News
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Global AI summit mired in controversy

The UK-hosted Artificial Intelligence (AI) Safety Summit due to take place on Wednesday and Thursday this week, attended by world leaders and AI experts, is set to become the focus of a widening global debate on the dangers of AI. Last Thursday, UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set out the agenda for the discussion, coming down heavily on the side of the AI doom-mongers, who once again are warning that AI poses an existential threat to humanity itself.

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Editorial Team
Cyber Espionage News North Korea
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North Korea funding weapons program with cybercrime

Last week, the US seized 17 website domains alleged to have been used to defraud US and foreign businesses. These seizures come hard on the heels of previously sealed October 2022 and January 2023 court-authorized seizures of approximately $1.5 million of the revenue that the same group of IT workers collected from unwitting victims. According to the US Justice Department, The Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea has installed bogus contractors to steal from US companies in order to pay for weapons development.

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Tony Glover
Analysis cybercrime Healthcare
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Unknown threat actor targets the US Red Cross

The cyber-war just got dirtier. A year or two back, an age in cyber-years, even the most ruthless cyber-gangs avoided attacking medical facilities to create a better public image in the eyes of the hacker community. Their stance has weakened somewhat since then, with attacks on the health sector becoming more common. But a recent attack on the US Red Cross is unusual enough to ring alarm bells outside the cybersecurity community.

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John Wilkes
News One Minute Roundup
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Lazarus equips two new remote access trojan weapons – September 22nd

The Lazarus group is using two new remote access trojans to target health systems’ ManageEngine vulnerabilities.

The group recently made headlines after targeting healthcare entities in Europe and the US and has since evolved its malware to exploit the CVE-2022047966 vulnerability in the ManageEngine setup, allowing for remote code execution.

Its new RAT variants, QuiteRAT and CollectionRAT, allow for the attacker to run arbitrary commands, among other capabilities.

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Tony Glover
China Cyber Espionage News
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FBI sounds second call to arms to fight cybercrime

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is increasingly anxious to enlist the private sector in the losing battle it is fighting against global cybercrime and espionage. Speaking in Washington on Monday, FBI director Christopher Wray stressed the importance of “collaborative, public-private” operations in fighting cybercrime, developing a strategy previously outlined by FBI Deputy Director Paul Abbate at a Boston cybersecurity conference three months ago.

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